The first of his 14 stand-up comedy specials for HBO was filmed in 1977. From the late 1980s, Carlin’s routines focused on socio-cultural criticism of modern American society. He often commented on contemporary political issues in the United States and satirized the excesses of American culture. In 2004, Carlin placed second on the Comedy Central list of the 100 greatest stand-up comedians of all time, ahead of Lenny Bruce and behind Richard Pryor. He was a frequent performer and guest host on The Tonight Show during the three-decadeJohnny Carson era, and hosted the first episode of Saturday Night Live. His final HBO special,It’s Bad for Ya, was filmed less than four months before his death. In 2008, he was posthumously awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

The Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion was a television signal hijacking in Chicago, Illinois, on the evening of November 22, 1987. It is an example of what is known in the television business as broadcast signal intrusion. The intruder was successful in interrupting two television stations within three hours. Neither the hijacker nor the accomplices have ever been found or identified.

WGN-TV

The first occurrence of the signal intrusion took place during WGN-TV (channel 9)’s live telecast of its primetime newscast, The Nine O’Clock News. During Chicago Bears highlights in the sports report, the station’s signal was interrupted for about half a minute by a video of a person wearing a Max Headroom mask, standing in front of a swaying sheet of corrugated metal, which imitated the background effect in the Max Headroom TV and movie appearances. There was no audio, only a buzzing noise. The hijack was stopped after engineers at WGN switched the frequency of their studio link to the John Hancock Center transmitter.

WTTW

Later that night, around 11:15 p.m., during a broadcast of the Doctor Who serial Horror of Fang Rock, PBS station WTTW (channel 11)’s signal was hijacked using the same video that was broadcast during the WGN-TV hijack, this time with distorted audio.[1] The person in the Max Headroom mask appeared, as before, this time saying, “That does it. He’s a freakin’ nerd,” before laughing and jeering, “Yeah, I think I’m better than Chuck Swirsky. Freakin’ liberal.”

The unidentified man continued to utter various phrases, including New Coke‘s advertising slogan “Catch the Wave” while holding a Pepsi can (Max Headroom was a Coca-Cola spokesperson at the time), then tossing the can down, and giving the finger wearing a rubber extension over his middle finger (the gesture was cut off at the bottom of the screen due to the close-up of the camera) then retrieving the Pepsi can, and saying “Your love is fading,” before removing the rubber extension, then began humming the theme song to Clutch Cargo, and stating that he had “made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds” (the call letters WGN are an abbreviation for “World’s Greatest Newspaper,” in reference to the Tribune Company‘s Chicago Tribune). He then held up a glove and said, “My brother is wearing the other one,” and he put the glove on, commenting that it was “dirty” along with some unintelligible comments.

The picture suddenly cut over to a shot of the man’s lower torso. His buttocks were exposed, and he was holding the now-removed mask up to the camera (with the rubber extension now placed in the mouth of the mask) while being spanked with a flyswatter by an unidentified accomplice wearing a dress; he howls, “Oh no, they’re coming to get me!” The transmission then blacked out and cut off, and the hijack was over after about 90 seconds.

WTTW, which maintains its transmitter atop the Sears Tower, found that its engineers were unable to stop the hijacker. According to station spokesman Anders Yocom, technicians monitoring the transmission “attempted to take corrective measures, but couldn’t.” “By the time our people began looking into what was going on, it was over,” he told the Chicago Tribune. WTTW was able to find copies of the hijacker’s telecast with the help of Doctor Who fans who had been taping the show.

Reaction

Not long after the incident, WMAQ-TV humorously inserted clips of the hijacking into a newscast during Mark Giangreco‘s sports highlights. “A lot of people thought it was for real – the pirate cutting into our broadcast. We got all kinds of calls about it,” said Giangreco.

John MacDougall, then 25, was the lonely pamphleteer of lore, only instead of paper and ink he was armed with a 30-foot transmission dish, an electronic keyboard, and a burning objection to HBO’s decision in 1986 to begin scrambling its satellite signal and charging viewers $12.95 a month.

That move and price had offended MacDougall’s sense of fair play – and all but halted the sales being generated by his fledgling satellite dish business in Ocala, Fla. So at 12:32 a.m. on Sunday, April 27, he transformed himself into Captain Midnight by commandeering HBO’s satellite transmission signal – interrupting a showing of The Falcon and the Snowman – and putting in its place the above protest message that aired for four-and-a-half minutes.

On 17 March this year, the federal department of justice (DoJ) decided that enough was enough and it has made moves to have the New Orleans police department (NOPD) placed under the supervision of a federal judge. The New Orleans jail system will likely follow.

The department released a report covering only the past two years and ignoring several current federal investigations of police officers for murder. It says, more or less, that the NOPD is incapable on any level; that it is racist; that it systemically violates civil rights, routinely using “unnecessary and unreasonable force”; that it is “largely indifferent to widespread violations of law and policy by its police officers” and appears to have gone to great lengths to cover up its shootings of civilians. “NOPD’s mishandling of officer-involved shooting investigations,” the report says, “was so blatant and egregious that it appeared intentional in some respects.”

He said another victim had tried to clean herself with bleach after being attacked.

One of his patients had given herself an injection of chlorine in the belief that this would stop herself becoming pregnant.

ARE the con men, the shills and the short-change artists of the old time circus and carnival deserting the field for the more generous one of big business? The present-day short-change artist is entirely modernized with up-to-date methods. Methods have to be up-to-date to make it possible to short-change an experienced bank teller, and that is exactly what they are doing. As a side line to thus robbing banks, odd fives and tens are daily picked up in drug stores, filling stations, etc. Usually the storekeeper first finds it out when counting up at night; the short-change artist is clever!

✮ Video: Man Caught Peeing on Cough Drops in Drug Store

Investigators say the man went to the aisle where the cough drops are kept, looked around, unzipped his pants, and urinated on about 110 packages of cough drops.

From war, art. This is the basic premise of The Graffiti of War , a project from two combat veterans that features the unconventional military art that soldiers, seamen, marines, and airmen (and women) create during deployments. From tanks spray painted with “I love u baby” to memorials for the dead to enemy jets covered in graffiti, every art work tells a story. It’s the alternative, unauthorized history of war from those who fought it.

✮ ATLAS HOODS: BOTSWANA’S COWBOY METALHEADS

Love it or hate it, when most people think of metal, they think of white dudes. Even if metal was born from the blues and there are growing scenes in places like Indonesia and Peru, metal’s founding fathers–Priest, Sabbath, Maiden–and most of those who’ve come after have been unmistakably Caucasian. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to find out about a small but passionate collection of guys who dressed like doomsday cowboys and listened to Motorhead in the predominantly black, central African country of Botswana.

One of the 3 Harleys built by Maurice Combalbert for the clip “Harley Davidson”. The last one still existing. Brigitte Bardot. 1968.

Now showing at Los Angeles’ Geffen Contemporary museum: “the first major U.S. museum survey of graffiti and street art,” an exhibition that reverently displays “installations by 50 of the most dynamic artists from the graffiti and street art community.”

Translation: They’re having wine and cheese parties surrounded by framed images of urban blight. They’re giving the destruction of other people’s property a hallowed place in high-art halls.

Thanks Smart Crew

Awesome collection of vintage video game arcade pictures.

In recent years, there have been many speculative writings about Planet X, which is also known as Planet Nibiru. Most of these writings are based somewhat on Zecharia Sitchin’s book, The Twelfth Planet. Sitchin, like Velikovsky and Darwin, used his respective theories to support his claims. A question arises: Is Nibiru real? The answer to that is a resounding “Yes”.

There are those who believe that the Anunnaki of Nibiru are coming back to Earth soon. They believe that Planet X is going to pass by Earth, in May or June of 2003, on its 3,600 year orbit around our sun. Such believers are terrified of the consequences that a close pass by Nibiru might bring. They fear this will cause earthquakes, tidal waves, severe flooding, food shortages due to climatic conditions, diseases, meteor fire storms, volcanic eruptions and the like. They are afraid that it will result in a great catastrophic infliction of loss of life on Earth.

So here’s a few nutty points about the birth certificate sure to be seized upon by the nonbelievers

Microbiologist Arturo Casadevall of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City recalls learning several years ago that single-cell fungi had been found thriving inside the collapsed nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, Ukraine. He and his colleagues later saw reports that the cooling water in some working nuclear reactors turns black from colonies of melanin-rich fungi.

Nuclear reactors are intense sources of gamma rays, which can zap through living organisms and leave behind trails of destruction. Many microorganisms can survive in extreme environments, but Casadevall thought that something more might be going on. Perhaps the fungi were growing thanks to the radiation, not in spite of it. “The thought was that biology never wastes any energy source,” he says.

It took jurors about five minutes to reach their verdict in the February trial. Juror Patrick Reeves tells The Spokesman-Review someone would “have to be an idiot” not to realize Richardson simply forgot to pay.

The Demon Core was the nickname given to a 6.2-kilogram (14 lb) subcritical mass of plutonium that accidentally went critical in two separate accidents at the Los Alamos laboratory in 1945 and 1946. Both incidents resulted in the acute radiation poisoning and subsequent death of a scientist. After these incidents, the sphere of plutonium was referred to as the Demon Core.